Monday, November 24, 2014

Allan Kornblum, R.I.P.

Sad news: Allan Kornblum, whom many of us knew as the presiding genius of Coffee House Press, has died. I heard the news from Michael Coffey, who kindly agreed to let me post his tribute to Kornblum:

Allan Kornblum was a true pioneer in American publishing. He was present at the creation of the small press movement, which fed upon energies for social change in the 1960s and that sited its passions in a not-for-profit business model. This inevitably brought Allan from Iowa City, where he learned the craft of letterpress from the legendary Harry Duncan, to Minneapolis in the early 1980s, an environment that benefited from a progressive state arts program (Allan joined Scott Walker, who had moved Graywolf Press to the Twin Cities, from Port Townsend, Wash., for similar reasons). Coffee House Press, a new name for what in Iowa had been called Toothpaste Paste—a renaming reflecting Allan's intention to build a larger community around his literary press—was among the original eight publishers distributed by the then-fledgling Consortium Books and Sales Distribution. Allan's combination of book-making skills and his tastes for the New York School of poets, for new ethnic voices in America, and particularly those voices that had found their way to the Upper Midwest, made for an impressive and award-winning list.

Of course, to all in the independent publishing community, Allan was a longtime friend and presence at the various book fairs, particularly the BEA, where he would appear each year with a printer's apron and visor and a new broadside of a poem beautifully typeset by hand and always having to do with the wonder of language and books. Allan published a book of my poems because, he told me, "Michael, I can see these poems matter to you—and it comes through. That's what I want to publish." Allan, ever the visionary—there was no foot-dragging at Coffee House about doing books in digital formats—also saw his own end approaching, and managed a brilliant succession, selecting and then grooming and then adjudging that he had his man in Chris Fishbach, who now steers the press with his own independent and unique tastes (which Allan told me was as important as anything) but also with a spirit that is the continuation of Allan's. As for the larger literary culture, it is by Allan's efforts that we have been able to follow Anne Waldman's essential trajectory, read the delicate poetry of the brilliant Anselm Hollo and got the whole of Ron Padgett's work. Not to mention the finds: Laurie Foos and Karen-Tei Yamashita and Sam Savage, these discoveries that now meld into Chris's, with Eimar McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing as the latest example. In this instance, Allan's passing does not mark, for publishing, an end of anything, but rather highlights a bright legacy that has been handed on, for which we should be thankful.